I've been restless lately, in need of a project. I've looked at a few hackathons and similar events, but what I want is something a little more extended than a weekend, and a little more compatible with my vital weekend afternoon nap schedule. But I've been feeling in particular that I ought to do more to improve my visual design skills...

A few months ago I gave a presentation as part of 501 Commons' Brown Bag Training series on UX for nonprofits. The emphasis was on quick, low-cost activities that people at nonprofits could start doing without a lot of training, but would still provide useful feedback for their websites...

I was sick this weekend and spent a lot of time either in bed or on the couch trying to move and speak very little. So, among other things, I read a lot of twitter, and on Saturday I noticed lots of people talking about this game called Flappy Bird. which, in case you haven't heard, is the terrible, unfun game that no one can stop playing...

Well, after a long process of messing around with wireframes, colors, fonts, content drafts, fiddling, tweaking and general fear of committment, I've finally ~officially launched~ a redesign I've been intending for nearly two years.

Awhile back I broke up with my hosting company and moved to A Small Orange, which has been lovely so far. In the move I broke my blog, and rather than deal with it I just ignored it for awhile. But I have now unbroken my blog, and it's sort of still the time for posting things like year-end lists and new year's resolutions, so I thought I'd write something to mark the occasion...

I learned about this Diverse Universe project way too late to participate, but of course it's exactly what I started doing with book reviews on this blog two years ago. Some of the books are ones I've read and reviewed, but many of them are not, so I've got a bunch more books to add to my reading list. Check it out!

So it turns out that when you stop working in your PJs on the couch and actually go to an office every morning, it's a lot harder to use the time when you can't sleep and can't stand to stay in bed anymore to write blog posts. But I read the first two books of N. K. Jemisin's Inheritance trilogy this summer, and now the third book is due out in a month so I thought I'd tell a little story about reading them...

Malinda Lo was born in China and grew up in Colorado. Ash is her first novel, but her second, Huntress, came out earlier this month. I am pretty excited to have more great young adult fantasy to read. Ash is, in the author's own words, "a lesbian retelling of Cinderella." Now, if you're me, that plus a quick peek at the star rating on Amazon (average is 4) is enough to send you straight to the library to place a hold, but maybe you are not me, and are not so inherently excited about fairy tale retellings, or ladies falling in love with each other. Maybe you need some convincing! Allow me to convince you...

I keep reading books by this lady, and I just keep wanting to read more! I even bought The Salt Roads this weekend from the Friends of the Library book sale. I guess I like her writing. This latest, The New Moon's Arms I actually listened to as an audiobook, so I'm going to include a little section at the end reviewing specifically the audiobook listening experience, not just the story itself. Which is rather different from the previous two Hopkinson novels I read. Instead of being an action-filled plot set sometime in the future, The New Moon's Arms is a character novel set in the present day, on a group of fictional Caribbean islands...

I think I've mentioned before that I believe I have a non-verbal learning disability. Self-diagnosed, but I don't need to be a trained child psychologist to know that I'm unusually clumsy, get easily disoriented and confused in unfamiliar surroundings (I have some great stories about getting lost! and by great I mean they range from kind of terrifying to super-embarrassing-but-we-laugh-about-it-now), have a very poor visual memory but a great auditory memory, and trouble with non-verbal social cues. I can't tell you about what my motor skills development was like when I was young, but I was definitely verbally precocious, and my social skills used to be lot worse than they are now. I also can remember having a lot of trouble understanding what the point of some stories were, even when I could easily read all the words...